Updates, new content, and other helpful information from the LiveCycle Help Content Team

Archive for January, 2009

The LiveCycle ES Update 1 (8.2) installation includes Assembler IVS, which is a great tool for testing DDX expressions without having to modify a Workbench ES process. The tool also includes some nice examples that illustrate different DDX concepts such as assembling a document, disassembling a document by bookmarks and pages, and converting a PDF document to PDF/A.

Assembler IVS is also a good way to validate your installation as described in the blog entryValidating a LiveCycle Install posted on the LiveCycle Product Blog. In fact, IVS is an acronym for Installation Verification Sample.

Have you ever sat at your desk thinking, now wouldn’t it be great if they thought to put in a feature that did “x” or “y”? Well here’s your chance to speak up!

The Adobe Reader team is eliciting feedback from you. They would like to know what you want to see most in the next few versions of Adobe Reader. Take the survey at the link below, it should take you about 5 minutes.

You can use the Assembler service to combine multiple documents into a PDF Portfolio that specifies how a viewer application’s user interface presents collections of file attachments. When your process or application invokes Assembler, it provides a Document Description XML (DDX) that describes the PDF Portfolio you want to produce. This article describes different types of PDF Portfolios and the DDX expressions you can use to produce them.

You can add common layout and background elements to a form design using master pages. A form design is the design-time version of a form that you create in LiveCycle Designer ES. By default, all new form designs have a master page, which is applied to the first page. Any page that you add to the form design is formatted according to the layout of the default master page unless you create and apply different master pages to other pages.

At the very least, master pages can define the orientation and dimensions of pages. For example, you can create one master page for portrait orientation and a second master page for landscape orientation. In more complex forms, you can use master pages to adjust the size and position of content areas, add page numbering, company logos, and create single- or double-sided features (such as headers and footers).

This article assumes that you have some knowledge of programming concepts and are familiar with web services and LiveCycle Remoting. For information about using web services and LiveCycle Remoting, see "Invoking LiveCycle ES Using LiveCycle Remoting" and "Invoking LiveCycle ES Using Web Services" in Programming with LiveCycle. The Backup and Restore service lets you put LiveCycle ES into backup mode, which enables hot backups to be performed. Hot backups permit you to backup the LiveCycle server while it is running, eliminating any downtime. The Backup and Restore service does not actually perform a backup of LiveCycle ES or restore your system. Instead, it puts your server in a state that enables you to perform consistent and reliable backups while your server continues to run. You are responsible for backing up the Global Document Storage (GDS) and the database connected to the LiveCycle ES server. The GDS is a directory used to store files, such as files used with long-lived processes.

As an administrator, you can use the LiveCycle Administration Console to put LiveCycle ES into backup mode. You can also programmatically put LiveCycle ES into backup mode using the Java API and web services, but because the Backup and Restore service cannot be used in a process created using Workbench ES, it cannot be invoked using LiveCycle Remoting as described in Programming with LiveCycle ES. To invoke the Backup and Restore service using LiveCycle Remoting, you must invoke the service directly. You may want to invoke the Backup and Restore service programmatically because you want to build software applications for backing up your server.

The trick to invoking a service directly using LiveCycle Remoting is to know the name of the service and the string values to refer to types, methods, and properties. To determine the string values, you can look at the WSDL on the server by referring to the WSDL by its name. (See the table at Invoking LiveCycle ES Using APIs > Invoking LiveCycle ES using Web Services). For example, to use the Backup and Restore service, you type the following in a web browser:

From returned WSDL, you can then determine the string names of the types, methods, and properties to use as values for accessing the remote objects for your ActionScript and MXML code. Alternatively, you can also determine the values to use by stepping through accessed objects using the debugger in Flex Builder and see the results from the ResultEvent.result property.

This blog entry, describes how to write ActionScript and MXML code to invoke the Backup and Restore service using LiveCycle Remoting to do the following tasks:

You know those notes that can be added to tasks using Workspace ES? (If you don’t, you can take a look at Working with notes and attachments). The Workbench ES help explains how to retrieve those notes as a document value after the form is submitted, but (believe it or not) the help leaves out a few details about how to reference the information in those notes.